lunes, 27 de mayo de 2013

A
conference on ‘Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe’ will take place at
the Ruusbroec Institute of the Universiteit Antwerpen from 4–7 June
2013. It is designed to bring together specialists working on diverse
geographical areas to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular
texts nuns read, wrote, and exchanged, primarily from the eighth to the
mid-sixteenth centuries. International experts will address these issues
in Antwerp. The resulting papers from this conference will form the
chapters of a published volume. This conference is the third in a series
of three: the first conference was held in Hull from 20–23 June 2011
and the second in Kansas
City from 5-8 June 2012.

Przemyslaw
Wiszewski (Uniwersytet Wroclawski; PL) - 'Power and Piety:
Pragmatic Writing in Medieval Nunneries in the Piast Realms
(Silesia and Poland), from the Thirteenth to the Fourteenth
Centuries'.

10.15-10.45 am:Coffee/Tea

10.45am-12.00 pm (Chair: Emilie Amt, Hood College; USA)

Alison
More (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen; NL) - 'Identity, Preaching
and Literacy: The Emergence of a Textual Identity in Houses of
Franciscan Tertiary Women'.

miércoles, 15 de mayo de 2013

The number of historical documents which are available in digital
form has dramatically increased throughout the last five to ten years.
Consequently, there has also been a significant growth in the
development of computerized tools for the support of the analysis of
such documents. The project “Script and Signs. A Computer-based Analysis
of Highmedieval Papal Charters. A Key to Europe’s Cultural History”,
which is funded by the e-humanities initiative of the German Ministry of
Education, therefore organizes a international symposium. The aim of
this symposium is to bring the world’s leading experts on historical
document analysis from a diverse set of fields, such as Pattern
Recognition, Computer Vision, Medieval History and Auxiliary Sciences of
History together.
This inital point provide a compilation of results of single projects in order to focus on them in the future.

domingo, 5 de mayo de 2013

The theme of this year’s conference concerns the transmission of
knowledge, from masters to students, from practitioners to audience. It
includes the liberal arts, the fine arts, and even the practical arts.
Topics might include monastic as well as university education; the
trivium and quadrivium; the history of theology, science, music,
mathematics, and dialectic; art history, especially the training of
artists; the
education of women; and professional training in guilds.

Scholars from all disciplines of medieval studies and from all regions of the United States encouraged to submit abstracts.

"All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already exisiting knowledge" – this famous introductory sentence of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics does not only apply to sciences specifically, but also to any activity based on experience and expertise, which is not the result of nature, but of "techne", i.e., human craftsmanship in the broadest sense. Any proficiency, whether it results in an object, a created artifact, or consists in a certain practical or theoretical ability itself, has to be learned. This is a fact which is independent from age and life experience. In this respect, being a disciple is essential to being human. A master, on the other hand, is someone who does not only have experience, expertise and knowledge, but is also able to convey it to others. He is not only acquainted with the facts and circumstances in question, but also has the methodological knowledge that is required to impart one’s own expertise to others. Hence, the disciple- master relation is a fundamental part of any higher culture and a key to understanding all culturally transmitted skills and encoded knowledge.

However, the basis of this central relation of cultural conveyance of competences and knowledge is the individual experience of the involved carriers: primarily of the disciple and the master themselves, then as well of the particular institutions. To study the manifestation of this experience in its various facets within Latin and Greek Byzantine, within Arabic and Hebrew tradition, in the worlds of laity and scholars, but also within everyday culture, the focus lies on a subject which has often been dealt with only incidentally and instrumentally, for instance in the context of biographical or doctrinal questions, or the history of institutions of education.

Thus, the point of departure of the 39th Kölner Mediaevistentagung will be the disciple- master relation. Beyond language and cultural spheres the discursive practices and epistemological implications will be discussed, as well as the institutional requirements and the social understanding of these roles. Where can we find continuity, where common points of reference – perhaps in starting with models and traditions of late antiquity? Where do they sustain, where do new forms and new kinds of understanding of the relation of disciple and master emerge as a result of the clash of ancient traditions with the thenceforth culturally dominating religions based on revelation, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam?

sábado, 4 de mayo de 2013

Texts and Contexts is an annual conference held on the campus
of the Ohio State University devoted to Medieval and Renaissance
manuscripts, incunables and early printed texts in Latin and the
vernacular languages. The conference solicits papers particularly in the
general discipline of manuscript studies, including palaeography,
codicology, reception and text history.

In addition to the general
papers (of roughly 20 minutes), the conference also hosts the Virginia
Brown Memorial Lecture, established in memory of the late Virginia
Brown, who taught paleography at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies for some 40 years. We also welcome proposals for sessions of
two to three papers which might treat a more focused topic. Information
about the conference and the program may be found here.